Along with the increase of bandwidth capabilities in communication systems, video communication systems have become increasingly popular in both business and residential applications. Indeed, in the case of geographically distributed team collaboration, these systems avoid the travelling of the team collaborators and increase flexibility.
Videoconferencing technologies use video and audio communication to allow a plurality of people to communicate at a same time, for instance for meeting activities. Furthermore, besides the audio and visual transmission of meeting activities, videoconferencing technologies can be used to share documents and display information.
Each participant in a videoconference is filmed by a camera which generates a video stream representing the participant in his/her own environment. To create an immersive video conference, the silhouette of each participant is extracted from corresponding video stream and all extracted silhouettes are displayed in a virtual conference environment, e.g. grouped around a virtual table. Such a virtual conference environment is a virtual background to simulate a meeting in a common virtual space, shared between all the participants, or to replace the actual background of a participant with another background such as a marketing banner.
One example of a system based on this principle is presented in “An immersive 3D video-conferencing system using shared virtual team user environment” by P. Kauf and O. Schreer in Proc. Of the 4th International Conference on Collaborative Environments, pp.105-112, 2002. This 3D video conference provides a representation of participants in a shared virtual meeting environment and relies on a multiple video capture of each participant of the video conference.